Sandy to bring gusty weather, followed by cool front

Late-season storm, expected to slide east of Florida, likely to bring strong winds here and usher in colder weather in its wake

By KATE SPINNER

Gusty winds are on the way this weekend, followed by a couple of chilly nights to start next week, as Hurricane Sandy — forecast to be a tropical storm by then — passes east of Florida.

But when the winds start to whip, the tropical storm will only be partly to blame. While Sandy blows through the Bahamas on Friday and Saturday, cool air from the north is expected to push down, creating a vast river of gusty breezes between the two very different air masses.

Forecasts for Southwest Florida predict 25 mph winds Friday and Saturday with gusts of up to 38 mph. Temperatures on Monday and Tuesday will dip into the mid-70s during the day, with high 50s at night in the wake of Sandy's passage.

“Sandy has very low pressure, and whenever you have very high pressure right up against very low pressure, winds speed up,” said Bryan Mroczka, meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Ruskin.

Sandy may bring some rain and wind to Southeast Florida, depending on how close it gets to the state, but any wind in this region won't be from the storm, Mroczka said.

Sandy made landfall near Kingston, Jamaica, Wednesday as a Category 1 hurricane with winds of 80 mph. The storm emerged from the island almost unchanged about 5 p.m. The storm was forecast to bring up to 20 inches of rain and damaging winds overnight to Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba.

The National Hurricane Center forecast put Sandy north of Cuba by this morning, with a track through the Bahamas later and into Friday.

A tropical-storm warning was issued Wednesday for the east coast of Florida from Ocean Reef to Sebastian Inlet, with watches extending north and south.

The storm's future is uncertain, but some forecasters are not ruling out the possibility that Sandy could wallop the Mid-Atlantic states or New England.

The official forecast calls for Sandy to weaken and dissipate as it moves offshore of the east coast and out to sea. But a low-pressure trough moving across the country could interact with Sandy and drag tropical wind and rain north along the jet stream, said Dave Samuhel, senior meteorologist with Accuweather.com.

That situation would create a large hybrid storm that could affect a number of states north of Florida.

For Florida's west coast, Sandy and the cold air mass are likely to bring more good than harm. In addition to helping usher in cooler weather, the winds could push a persistent red tide bloom far away.

The patchy bloom now stretches between Charlotte Harbor and Naples, but should move south and offshore with the change in the wind, said Jason Lenes, research associate with the University of South Florida's Center for Prediction of Red Tides. The red tide's algal bloom was responsible for multiple fish kills on beaches south of Siesta Key.

Far out in the Atlantic, Tropical Storm Tony is forecast to fizzle out without affecting land.

Tony is this season's 19th named storm — 10 of them hurricanes — making this season one of the busiest on record. This year so far ties for third place with 1887, 1995, 2010 and 2011, according to Jeff Masters' blog on Weather Underground.

Masters predicts that at least one more storm will form this year, which would bring 2012 into a tie with 1933 for the second-largest number of named storms to form in a year.